“People forget that to get the golden egg, somebody has to fuck the goose.”

Scott Foe, Producer of Nokia’s Reset Generation

Last Monday I was invited to take part in the 4Talent Mobile Games Pitch.

This event, now in its second year, saw nine finalists chosen from over 200 entries and invited to Channel 4’s headquarters near Westminster for an intensive day of presentations and mentoring sessions about games design, the potential of the mobile platform, and the art of delivering a successful pitch for a creative project.

At the end of the day, each finalist would pitch their game idea to a panel of judges, with the winner being presented with a £1,000 prize at the 2008 Golden Joystick awards, and the option of a placement at EA Mobile and/or Nokia (the specifics weren’t entirely clear on the day).

The mentoring sessions were hosted by Sergio Falletti (Future Platforms), Jeferson Valadares (EA Mobile) and Alex Bubb (Nokia PR).

Alex Bubb’s session went into great detail about the new possibilities for mobile games offered by Nokia’s recently relaunched N-Gage gaming platform. All games on the N-Gage deck now offer trial versions and have consistent community and multiplayer features modelled closely on Xbox Live’s interface.

I’d been sceptical of the N-Gage initiative in the past, viewing it as a walled garden with the odds firmly stacked against it, but Alex argued convincingly that in the wake of the iPhone App Store the mobile operators took a more welcoming view of manufacturer-owned channels.

The fact that Nokia have now managed to implement the platform across all their main Symbian-powered handsets may make N-Gage more appealing to games publishers. (This allows for a single SKU to be put in front of an audience potentially far larger and, importantly, more global than the iPhone’s - the Golden Egg that Scott Foe had so graphically alluded to in the quote above.) It will be interesting to see how the market gets carved up between N-Gage, iPhone, Android, traditional J2ME and BREW, and probably some others I’ve forgotten.

Jeferson Valadares gave advice on how to clearly define the scope and purpose of a project, using seemingly obvious but easily overlooked techniques such as trying to summarise the game in one sentence or to script the first three minutes of gameplay. The challenge was to give an accurate impression of what your game was about while at the same time making this engaging and understandable in the context of what the audience was likely to be familiar with.

Finally, Sergio Falletti gave some pointers on how the designs we’d refined and polished through the day could be effectively condensed down into a fifteen minute oral presentation. This was an exercise not unlike structuring an essay: starting with question or argument, the audience would then be led through a brief discussion of different aspects of the game, starting with the basics, then layering on more complexity before addressing issues sparked off from this (such as, in my case, how the game would exploit connectivity, how information would be conveyed to the player and the technical and commercial feasibility of the project).

After cakes and frantic final preparations, we were led into the Channel 4 boardroom to present our pitches to a panel of judges, in a format not unlike that of Dragon’s Den or The X-Factor. On the judging panel were Tim Harrison (Electronic Arts, previously head games honcho at Vodafone), Scott Foe (Nokia), Mandy Pollard (Channel 4 Mobile) and Robin Always (Future Publishing).

The eight finalists came from fairly diverse backgrounds and as such there was almost no overlap between the ideas pitched. Many of the pitches made creative use of the camera, GPS and connectivity functions that are becoming increasingly commonplace on modern handsets. I thought the best example of this (although there were several other strong ideas) was in Matt Watkins’s game “Running Rings”, which was based on the simple but significant realisation that the scale between real world space (plotted by GPS) and game space does not have to remain fixed.

As I love to make things difficult for myself, I largely ignored the brief’s preoccupation with using exotic technical features and pitched a fairly traditional game (Way of the Dodo) that I was confident could feasibly implemented across a wide range of devices, and would appeal to the market.

My game, Way of the Dodo*, was pitched as an adventure/puzzle title with a core mechanic (guiding indirectly-controlled agents to an exit) rooted in the tradition of Lemmings, Flicky, Krusty’s Super Fun House and Chu Chu Rocket. Instead of discrete levels, the game would be based around a free-roaming environment which the player would be prompted to explore to figure out methods to get the birds to cooperate. As the game progressed information would accumulate in the player’s Journal (similar to the lore scans in the Metroid Prime games).

The intention behind this design was to teach the player some basic concepts of how the natural world works and why conservation is a Big Deal through the mechanics of the game itself, rather than by lecturing them with facts and figures. My main inspiration for this approach had been Sim City (for obvious reasons) and the morality system in Ultima IV, both of which teach ideas that are applicable beyond the scope of the game.

I made some (admittedly rather token) effort to emphasise the potential for connectivity to social networks, but the judges’ response was quite valid - there was little in my design that bound the game specifically to the mobile platform. (As to whether platform agnosticism is necessarily a flaw, in the real world, I expect Alexey Pajitnov and Jordan Mechner might have something to say about that, but I suppose that wasn’t the point of the exercise.)

The winning pitch (Finders Keepers) was made by Tobias Rowe, a games design student from Colchester. Within the opening minutes of his pitch it was clear that he had struck upon an intriguing concept: a game in which the players, as notorious cat burglars, could stage attempts to break into other players’ vaults which was perfect for the medium and made a social aspect of the gameplay integral to the game.

The idea of leaving personalised calling cards after successfully robbing your friend’s trap-laden vault was a particularly inspired touch, seemingly designed to spark off escalating feuds between committed players. I’m sure that this game, implemented well, would be a huge hit whether realised on mobile or social networks (or better yet, on both).

At the close of the day, I felt that I’d had an enjoyable time and learned a lot about both designing games (something that I’ve never really done independently in a formal context - I hardly think Scrumper counts…) and also pitching those design ideas in a way that reassures and engages the listener. Thanks, Channel 4! (And Nokia and EA, and everyone who gave up their time to be involved, of course.)

*A title with several meanings: something going the way of the dodo, meaning extinct, implying that the game was about endangered species; the fact that you’re tasked with guiding the dodo’s “way” to the exit; a play on the naming convention for kung-fu games/films (e.g. “Way of the Exploding Fist”, “Way of the Dragon”, etc.); and finally a tongue in cheek comment on the state of the mobile games business. I thought about calling it Dodo Agogo, but that would be silly.

As a result, any game featuring robots is likely to pique my interest, especially when they’re old-skool, LEDs-for-eyes, bleep-bloop retro-futuristic ‘bots of the sort Maggie Philbin had convinced us would be moving in next door by 1990.

Droid Assault, as the title suggests, features dozens of the blighters (48 distinct varieties in fact), who have quite stereotypically run amok in the warehouses and factories of their creator, Omni Corp. The player is tasked with bringing the situation under control by destroying or capturing all the droids on each level. The basic framework is lifted from the C64 game Paradroid, although afforded a more action-oriented slant thanks to the implementation of mouse aiming and cursor key movement controls.

Droids are captured by getting a bead on them and snaring them with a transfer beam (right mouse button) for a couple of seconds. Capturing new droids remains an important goal throughout the game as droids can only take so much damage (and repair powerups are rare) and as the game progresses new varieties appear equipped with better armour, weapons and AI.

Capturing droids is dependent on a resource called capture points, one of which is awarded for every 1,000 points scored. This introduces an incentive to risk trying to kill multiple droids in quick succession, as a score multiplier kicks in for chaining kills.

This system lets the player experiment with a whole range of strategic options: blow all their points on a single top-of-the-line droid, or grab a few cheaper patrol units to provide covering fire? Frequently it also results in desperate games of cat and mouse when down to the last droid with a sliver of health, trying to make enough clean kills to be able to afford a new metal body. Excessive greed can quickly become a player’s undoing if they get into the habit of weaving through crowds of droids in the hope that a better one is round the corner.

Towards the second half of the game, it becomes clear that a coherent strategy (as well as unwavering reflexes and a not insignificant amount of luck) is needed to make progress. Droids can accumulate a number of potentially crucial weapon and armour upgrades (overdrive, bouncy bullets and sharp bullets - which can travel through walls - being particularly powerful), but as health tends to be in short supply, it seems wise to designate less invested-in droids to scouting new areas and making captures, keeping the favoured ones in reserve for boss battles and siege-like Danger Stages.

While the difficulty level can be ruthless, at no time does it feel unfair. The player is constantly reminded that they are potentially much more effective at piloting the droids than the enemy AI, and that inattentiveness, panic or poor judgment can be more immediately lethal than massed enemy firepower.

The game’s presentation is almost note-perfect. The blocky neo-retro art style is inherently satisfying and makes it easy to distinguish between the many flavours of droids in the heat of battle. The animation and sound design also help to give the droids personality. There’s also quite a lot of humour in the game, with the descriptions for each droid riffing on Robocop, Warhammer 40k, Douglas Adams and even Willo the Wisp, and some rather silly tannoy announcements.

There are some minor issues with the graphics. The birds-eye view makes it occasionally difficult to tell if an obstacle is a solid wall or a pit (and therefore whether it will block shots and hovering droids). The particle effect for the flamethrower looks out of place, and doesn’t match the blockier style used for objects that have been set on fire, sparks and smoke.

Even more pedantic, the way that captured droids all switch to the same colour scheme (over-riding their normal colours, which indicate which tier they belong to) can sometimes make it difficult to quickly identify which ones on your team are the most valuable. (Likewise, there’s nothing to indicate which weapon each droid has without firing it, which isn’t always desirable in an enclosed space.) As I said, minor issues.

Droid Assault is not (and needn’t be) a staggeringly ambitious game. The mechanics are fleshed out enough for it not to feel like a student project or simple stylistic exercise, and it’s cheap enough (£5.82 inc. VAT) to offset the valid criticism that there isn’t any content beyond the (long, challenging and eminently replayable) single player campaign.

It fits perfectly into the downloadable PC game niche, being just a mite too small for traditional retail, and too good (and dependent on nice graphics and robust IO) to be implemented in clumsy Flash. (I was actually going to review a vaguely similar Flash game, Robokill, before I played Droid Assault, but won’t bother now as Droid Assault utterly kicks its teeth in. Sorry Robokill guys!)

As I see it, the game’s greatest weakness is its external presentation. Based on screenshots I can imagine the game being dismissed by many as just another nostalgic retro game in the vein of PomPom, Llamasoft or Digital Eclipse’s typical output. The game’s ultra-generic title (almost as bad as Orcs and Elves) probably isn’t helping matters either. (It’s also worth noting that the word ‘droid’ in the title could incur the wrath of George Lucas.)

The game doesn’t seem to have generated anywhere near as much buzz as recent highly visible indie titles such as Braid and World of Goo, or even as (far less interesting) one-joke gimmick games such as …Burn the Rope or Super Jill Off.

This is a great shame, as Droid Assault is a truly fantastic little game, and easily one of the best I’ve played this year. I hope that many people buy it and give it good word of mouth, so that PuppyGames are able to make more titles of this quality for the PC, and perhaps consoles as well. Not because larger-scale projects are necessarily more valid as creative work, but because talent like this deserves the broadest possible audience and access to resources adequate to realise their ideas.

(Thanks to cliffski of Positech, whose awareness-raising for a petition to get more independent games on Steam is where I first noticed this game.)

The government commissioned a television psychologist to assess the situation and make recommendations. She recommended that the BBFC’s remit be extended to cover 12-rated games as well. This was a kneejerk response intended to justify the cost of the report, and its benefit to the public was never clearly explained.

Now there are rumblings that the government want to hand the whole process over to the BBFC. The BBFC seem to be quite keen on the idea of having a government mandate to shake down the games industry for additional millions of pounds each year, regardless of whether this is in the public interest.

Edge Online have published a column by BBFC chief David Cooke. It’s commendable that Edge are giving both sides of the debate a platform as opposed to only giving PEGI, ELSPA and the industry’s views an airing. A shame then, that Mr. Cooke’s arguments are trivially weak:

“It’s often forgotten that some of the biggest games countries in the world are not in PEGI but do their own games classification: for instance, the USA, Japan, Australia, and, within Europe, Germany. The public understands that different countries have different national sensibilities that need to be taken into account.”

I’m sure it must come as a surprise to many to learn that non-European countries aren’t part of the Pan European Games Information scheme. America has it’s own voluntary system (ESRB) which is broadly similar to PEGI, but kept from being legally enforcable by cultural and constitutional issues. Australia has a universally derided government-backed system which does not have any mechanism for rating games for adults.

Germany, here cited as an example of PEGI’s inability to address local sensibilities, uses its own system because it has by far the strictest censorship laws in the Western world. The UK, and the rest of Europe, does not have such excessively strict censorship enshrined in law (much to our merit), so the comparison is specious.

“There’s nothing wrong with a multi-national approach like PEGI, but you can see the problems involved in trying to regulate and enforce across dozens of countries.”

This statement is conspicuously vague, possibly because the PEGI system works, throughout Europe, and has done for several years now.

Mr Cooke then gets onto the topic of whether the BBFC had the resources to perform this work (which is much less relevant than the issue of why it should be doing it in the first place, and whether it is qualified to do so).

“I really reject the notion that the BBFC can’t handle issues of scaleability. Look at the DVD market. In 1997 we had just over 3,000 DVDs to classify. By 2006 that had risen to to over 15,000, an increase of 460%.

“In comparison, we do about 300 games a year at the moment.”

An organic rise in DVD releases (which obviously occurred in tandem with a decline in VHS releases) over nine years is in no way comparable to the immediate jump of several hundred percent which would occur if the BBFC were tasked with rating most or all games. Most of this influx of new titles would be content (children’s and family games) that the BBFC has no prior experience in dealing with.

The piece wraps up with some claims about the expertise and rigour of the BBFC’s process. I’m sure they’re perfectly competent, but that doesn’t make them any less redundant (not to mention expensive, obstructive, needlessly time consuming and likely to have chilling effects on artistic expression and consumer choice) when we already have a system that works in PEGI.

On June 30th 2008, after nine eventful years, London-based games developer Morpheme Game Studios officially ceased to exist.

You’ve probably not heard of Morpheme. Like dozens (perhaps hundreds) of other small developers in the UK, they quietly went about their business for years without ever being thrust into the limelight by a blockbuster hit or groundbreaking invention. For most of their history, Morpheme made games for mobile phones, and later branched out into Flash and downloadable casual games.

As none of Morpheme’s games had a physical manifestation, it’s sadly quite likely that most of them will sooner or later be impossible to obtain. I have therefore decided to write a brief history of the company to record for posterity that they did at least exist. (And also because they employed me for several years.)

I first became aware of Morpheme by chance when my university tutor referred me to them for a Summer internship back in 2000. At that time the company consisted of its three founders: Matt Spall, Lucy Reed and Andy Fitter, all industry veterans who had previously worked at Virgin Interactive and/or Psygnosis/SCEE. Morpheme HQ was initially a cramped office in a converted dress factory in London’s fashionable (for tramps) Kentish Town.

Morpheme had originally targeted the Game Boy Color (if I remember rightly), but finding that market monopolised by established players (such as Crawfish), the trio had turned their attention to the nascent mobile sector. At that time few other companies in the UK were working in mobile, the most notable being Digital Bridges (now known as I-Play).

The technology to allow phones to download applications (including games) was just emerging in Japan but was still years away from reaching Europe. The only option available in those early years was making client-server games which were played through the phone’s browser using WAP. If you consider that web browsing on modern phones is less than ideal, then try to imagine what it was like eight years ago and you can probably appreciate why WAP gaming didn’t take off.

During my first stint at Morpheme we were hired by Activision to create WAP versions of twelve of the classic Infocom text adventures. In all honesty I can’t say that text adventures were a good match for the limitations of the hardware of the time. The project did however require us to reverse-engineer the Z-Machine, which proved to be a valuable learning experience.

We tried to make the best of the suboptimal user interface by developing clever shortcuts to minimise typing. We came up with a way to monitor the player’s inventory in the game state and present it as a drop-down menu (not as trivial as you might think, as it was entirely possible to have objects hidden within other objects - one game even featured some objects which didn’t have names unless they were assigned by the player). We also created menus of the most common verbs and commands (N, S, E, W, GET, LOOK, etc.).

If there was a way to make the games available today, now we have predictive text and GPRS, I expect they would be just about playable. Unfortunately the completed project never saw the light of day and Nokia’s WAP gaming servers have (surely?) long since been shut down.

After that Summer, it would be three years before I returned to Morpheme. After finishing my degree I worked at a couple of PC games publishers, figuring that I needed to understand how games operated as a business before I could presume to ask people for money to make them. With this in mind I returned to Morpheme in 2003 to manage their (rapidly growing) distribution network.

Morpheme had changed a lot in the intervening years. J2ME (Java for phones, or “Java ME” as it’s now officially called) had become established as a mass-market feature, and as phones became more advanced, Morpheme had gradually started building more sophisticated games, with such exotic features as sound, real-time action and colour graphics. The company had been given a leg up to realise their ambitions when in 2002 it was acquired by Argonaut (who were the largest independent developer in Europe at the time).

By late 2003 Morpheme had over a dozen additional staff. They’d already launched a handful of J2ME games, most of which were quite small and simple as they were still getting to grips with the technology, and were putting the finishing touches on their first really ambitious game, Balloon Headed Boy.

Balloon Headed Boy was a brightly-coloured platform game with obvious overtones of Kirby, Earthworm Jim and Rainbow Islands but with a unique central mechanic: instead of jumping, players could inflate and deflate the character’s head, making the game a lot less twitchy than the average platformer, and better suited to play with a phone’s keypad. (Another influence on Balloon Headed Boy’s controls was the fact that J2ME was still only able to read one button press at a time. This shortcoming has long since been fixed, but is still sometimes wrongly cited as a limitation affecting modern mobile games.)

BHB proved to be a dependable workhorse over the years, being one of the first Western mobile games to successfully launch in China (where it was bizarrely marketed as an RPG) as well as being bundled with Panasonic’s phones, being ported to the PC as a browser game and later a full-blown downloadable game, and finally being relaunched in Europe and the US by Eidos Mobile. The ‘quirkiness’ that set Balloon Headed Boy apart from most other mobile games soon became one of Morpheme’s defining traits.

Over the next few years Morpheme matured into an efficient production line creating self-published mobile games as well as increasingly high-profile games for other publishers (including Eidos, THQ, Player One, Player X, I-Play and Infospace). All told, Morpheme developed somewhere in the region of 50 mobile games during this period. Teams were small (typically one programmer, artist, designer and producer, each of whom would juggle multiple projects at any given time), and development cycles ranged from a few weeks to over a year.

The single most successful game Morpheme ever developed was The Fast and The Furious (2003), published by I-Play. Mobile industry commentators often complain about publishers being too reliant on movie licenses and other externally sourced brands, but having witnessed the spectacular difference that being associated with a recognised brand made for this game (and the amount of original development - not to mention royalty payments - that it subsequently afforded us), I can see why the practice is so popular. I believe TFATF eventually shifted over two million units, a lot of which could be attributed to its presence on the US carrier decks, which would have almost certainly have been off limits without the license.

During this period it was still notionally possible for smaller developers to get original IP games onto the operator decks, although by 2006 consolidation had reached the point where the major publishers (EA, Gameloft and Glu, along with a handful of others who had maybe one or two games that couldn’t be ignored - such as Namco with Pac-Man and THQ with Worms) effectively owned these channels and saturated them with their own games.

Morpheme put out a steady stream of self-published, unbranded games. Some of these games were built on engines which could then be re-used in future projects for other publishers, while others were relatively quick and simple experiments.

While these games seldom sold huge numbers, they had a long tail, and could be sold into many countries with minimal modification. Occasionally an older game would unexpectedly see a small resurgance in China, Russia, or South America. The fact that the markets tended to be isolated from each other was also beneficial - unlike games on traditional formats, mobile games don’t have heavily publicised release dates and a short window to do most of their business. No-one complains when (for instance) a mobile game reaches the US two or three years after Europe and Asia.

Phantom Mansion (2003), like Balloon Headed Boy, was an original IP game that proved to have some legs. A spiritual (hoho) successor to Chip’s Challenge, it enjoyed a fair amount of success and was more recently reworked as an episodic Flash game. The engine was also used to make licensed games based on Shrek 2 and Hello Kitty.

(Incidentally, the programmers who worked on Phantom Mansion and The Fast and The Furious left Morpheme quite early on to set up their own company, Runestone Games, who are still around today as one of the few remaining ‘pureplay’ UK mobile developers.)

Bluetooth Biplanes (2004) was devised with the goal of implementing real-time multiplayer over Bluetooth. It was the first commercially available game to implement this feature, and netted Morpheme a BAFTA and a Develop award. Unfortunately the Bluetooth mode was only compatible with two specific Nokia handsets, which drastically reduced the commercial viability of the game, but it still made for good press.

As Morpheme didn’t have access to big licenses for their self-published games, making them stand out in the market often called for a bit of ingenuity. Sometimes this meant using ‘generic licenses’ (commonly understood concepts, such as golf, pinball and slot machines); sometimes games were given attention-grabbing titles (Go To Hell, Everything Explodes, Dr. Steve’s Fartbox).

However the game with the most inspired marketing gimmick had to be Jeremiah Manford’s Athletics. This was a rapidly-developed arcade athletics game released to coincide with the 2004 Olympics. Several distributors took the game on the strength of the endorsement by a famous athlete. This was all well and good - except for the fact that there was no Jeremiah Manford. We’d made him up.

While BAFTAs, psychedelic platformers and fictional sprinters were gaining Morpheme some wider recognition (within the mobile industry at least), things were not going quite so well at parent company Argonaut. In late 2004 they went into administration. Morpheme was saved from the brink by a management buyout and began its second stint as an independent.

Competition in the mobile sector intensified to the point where original IP was nearly impossible to get on the operator decks (unless the publisher was able to include it as part of a larger offering of licensed games). Morpheme needed a known license, with a proven track record, to pique their interest.

Croc Mobile: Jungle Rumble (2005) was, as the name suggests, a mobile game based on Croc, Argonaut’s platform game mascot character (IP which was readily available for Morpheme to use). This was the first game Morpheme published themselves which had a recognisable license attached - although it was far from certain whether the Croc brand (which had been dormant since 2001) still resonated with gamers.

The consumer reaction was quite promising. The first Croc Mobile game did six figure sales in the first year with virtually no marketing. (To put this in perspective, it sold about a quarter as many units as the first Sonic the Hedgehog mobile game over the same period - not too bad considering Sonic was among the highest profile gaming brands in mobile at the time.) Croc fared well in continental Europe, where mascot platformers (Hugo, Rayman, etc.) are often warmly received - and perhaps regions where a lot of people were still playing psOne games.

Jungle Rumble was followed by two more games in the franchise (Croc Mobile: Volcanic Panic - rejected tagline: “Prepare for more pumice-ment” - and Croc Mobile Pinball). The isometric engine used in Croc (the most advanced that had been attempted on mobile at the time, and which I remember proudly - and completely obliviously - demonstrating to Jon Ritman on one occasion) was re-used on a further three projects, culminating in Hitman Blood Money (2006) which I’ve briefly written about here.

Had circumstances been different we could perhaps have continued to build on this foundation, but unfortunately (and inevitably) after about a year of increasingly embattled conditions there was little enthusiasm left for either Croc or mobile games in general, and Morpheme started to move away from mobile to diversify into other formats. Projects were taking longer (especially when external parties were involved) and the massive growth of the sector predicted by analysts was failing to materialise.

Mobile game development was a harsh environment, where various factors have combined to make it virtually impossible for independent developers to survive. The infrastructure needed just to get a mobile game to market (supporting hundreds of phones and complying to the technical requirements of hundreds of operators) is probably the largest and most complex of any gaming platform ever.

The obsession with licenses is now abating slightly, as phones get good enough (and the places where you can buy games become more effective, in the wake of the iPhone store) for games to be marketable on their own merits. This adjustment is happening very slowly, however, and of course much too late for Morpheme.

(Somewhat frustratingly, some of the worst technical issues that had dogged mobile development - such as restrictive file size, memory, and CPU speed - improved drastically in the year after Morpheme quit the market, although it’s likely that mobile games have become even more expensive and complex to develop to exploit the extra capabilities.)

In late 2005 Morpheme started to turn its attention to other platforms. An experimental Flash game (Finger Frenzy) had unexpectedly become a viral hit, and work began on building an online games portal to get a foothold in the casual market. Morpheme’s last project to ship a mobile version was PRISM: Light the Way (covered previously), which demonstrated the new strategy of platform agnostic design, allowing the game to be implemented with minimal changes across PC, mobile and Nintendo DS.

The transformation from tech-focussed mobile developer to dynamic internet company was gradual, awkward and confusing, like a bizarre form of corporate puberty. The company’s online games portal was originally branded “Off The Wrist”, eliciting puerile sniggering from Brits and incomprehension from Americans. (The name was later changed to the much snappier Gimme5Games.) Morpheme persisted in spite of these initial stumbles, building up Gimme5Games’ profile and in 2007 being acquired by Eidos. Which brings us almost to the present - the decision as part of Eidos’ restructuring to retire the Morpheme name.

So what next for the Morpheme crew? As of this writing, part of the remaining team continue to make games and run the Gimme5Games portal under the aegis of parent company Eidos, while others have left to form a new independent developer. (I left Morpheme in 2006 to have other adventures in the world of games, but that’s a story for another time.)

So here’s to Morpheme, then. Okay, so mobile and casual games may not have bought us Ferraris or got us on the cover of Edge, but we were able to work on lots of small, genuinely innovative projects which didn’t need years of work or teams of hundreds of people. It was the sort of development environment which for most of the industry died out some time in the 1990s. Like an inflatable boy smacking a frog in a viking helmet, that’s not something you see every day.

Games developers are illusionists. Convincing players to mentally conjure places, people and stories out of rudimentary arrangements of switches and blinking lights demands something more than just engineering skill. As hardware has grown ever more powerful and sophisticated, the need for creative sleight-of-hand has not diminished.

That whizzy new console may provide a leap in processing and effects over its predecessors, but the novelty quickly palls leaving developers searching for increasingly cunning techniques to make this year’s blockbuster outperform last year’s while constrained to the same hardware.

One of the deepest and nerdiest pleasures of the games enthusiast is discovering how the trick works. I can reel off some personal favourites from games I’m most familiar with, but to get a truly diverse view I plundered the collective RLLMUK Forum memory-banks in this thread. Read on for ten of the most celebrated examples of gaming smoke and mirrors (with YouTube links where applicable).

Elite

It would be impossible to write a piece like this without mentioning Bell and Braben’s seminal space opera, which to this day remains one of the most seemingly extraordinary feats of procedural content generation ever attempted. There is really no trick to Elite, it’s just an application of elegant, economical mathematics - in the same way that putting a ship in a bottle is ‘just’ the application of a series of patient, exacting manual operations. At a time when most bedroom programmers were making their first fumbling steps beyond BASIC on the early home micros, Elite’s developers were teasing new game features from handfuls of bytes of assembly code.

Aside from their formidable coding prowess, Bell and Braben’s genius was in realising that what they wanted to do was even achievable with the hardware of the day. A final flourish was to effectively play up the exploratory nature of the gameplay, pointing out (quite truthfully) that even the creators hadn’t explored all of the game’s universe and mischievously hinting at mythical encounters (the infamous Generation Ships) waiting somewhere in the void.

I tend to avoid claiming that any particular classic title is a game that everyone should play. (I’m all too aware that there are many so-called essential games that I have yet to play myself.) I do however believe that Elite is one of the fundamental games (in the same category as Tetris, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros and Doom) without experience of which it would be almost impossible to understand how games have evolved and the potential of which they are capable.

Nebulus

Nebulus was a fairly simple platform game from the mid-1980s, which was built around a clever visual trick: Through the use of small snippets of cyclical animation, Nebulus appeared to wrap its two-dimensional playing area around a cylindrical tower.

Whereas in most games the camera would pan horizontally, in Nebulus it appears to rotate around the tower, fixing the player character in the centre of the screen. This effect was so uncannily convincing it was appropriated for use as a set-piece by many platform game developers over the next decade, good examples being Mickey Mania, Castlevania Bloodlines (at 4′30″) and Battletoads.

Red Zone

Red Zone, developed by demo scene veterans Zyrinx, was one of a number of late-period games for the Sega Mega Drive which pushed the machine to the very limits of it’s capabilities, far beyond what Sega had originally envisaged when they were conservatively porting System 16 games to the system nearly a decade before. (Contemporary technical showcases included Toy Story, Comix Zone and Sonic 3D Blast.)

On startup the game proudly announces a list of technical features that it will attempt to demonstrate in realtime without the aid of additional hardware (or a safety net). After a brief full motion video(!) intro (alright, it’s literally black and white, but the very possibility of FMV was unheard of for a cartridge-based game at the time), we’re into the game proper - a helicopter-based arcade flight sim (not unlike Desert Strike), presented in fully rotating, polygonal 3D.

In truth, the game engine is closer to the rotating bonus stages in the first Sonic the Hedgehog (albeit vastly smoother and more sophisticated) than genuine Mode 7-style sprite rotation, but it’s still capable of dropping the jaws of those who doubt the capabilities of the Mega Drive. On top of all that, the game also includes on-foot levels which use parallax scrolling to create pseudo-polygonal walls. Which brings us to:

Parallax scrolling

Parallax scrolling (the effect of moving layers of background scenery at different speeds depending on their ‘depth’ in the scene) was one of the most widely used techniques of the 16-bit era. It produced an effect that was visually attractive without being excessively computationally expensive (on the consoles at least). Initially it was used for a few layers of very flat looking scenery (e.g. Shadow of the Beast), but in later games the field was cut into increasingly fine slices, ultimately giving a passable impression of a texture-mapped plane (the most famous example being the ground in Street Fighter II).

There are many, many games that used variations of this technique, but three that were noted in the discussion were Lionheart on the Amiga, Thunderforce IV on the Mega Drive (which makes particularly good use of moving the layers vertically as well as horizontally), and perhaps the ultimate application of the technique, the opening level of The Adventures of Batman and Robin.

Shadow of the Colossus

Yeah, so, uh, about that list of essential games I haven’t gotten around to yet. Due to having had only very sporadic access to a PS2, I’ve not played through SOTC yet. (*cough* - or Ico. *cough*) Luckily, this article has given me some insight into what it’s doing that’s so clever.

Most of the effects described are based on hard-nosed technical innovation, but the developers have picked from all the tools and techniques at their disposal and implemented just enough of each to be convincing perceptually while not overwhelming the PS2 hardware. Any one of the seamless world, HDR lighting and fur effects would be reason enough to commend a PS2 game as ambitious, but to have all of this and more is truly praiseworthy.

Savage

Before David ‘Shiny’ Perry* thrilled the world with Aladdin, Earthworm Jim, MDK and, erm, Enter the Matrix, he churned out over a dozen games for the ZX Spectrum. The most visually striking of these was Savage for Probe Software. Although the Spectrum was capable of full-colour graphics (hence the name), it was hampered by a limitation of only being able to display two colours in each 8×8 pixel block of the display. Most developers sidestepped this issue by making most of the playing area monochrome, thereby avoiding the dreaded colour clash.

Savage was one of the few games that took on the challenge of designing its graphics to work in colour. In magazine screenshots, it looked almost like an Amiga game. (It helped that magazine screenshots at the time were taken from blurry televisions with conventional cameras - and of course that Spectrum owners desperately wanted to believe.) The game also featured somewhat less impressive Space Harrier-style racing sections, as well as some of the slick sprite animation that would become Perry’s hallmark.

*Imagine how confusing it would be if he started wearing a bandana.

Spectrum Doom

If coming up with a convincing answer to Doom was beyond the capabilities of the Amiga (and it blatantly was), what chance did the Spectrum have? Well, not much to be honest, but this amazing video shows that with a sprinkling of familiar elements, the sympathetic player can be tricked into ignoring the enormous gaps.

Donkey Kong Country

There was some controversy over whether Rare’s prerendered platformer really counted as a good ‘trick’. Technically, the SNES wasn’t being asked to do anything out of the ordinary - all that was different was the amount of sprite data and how it had been produced. Even though most of the trickery was on behalf of the marketing (blurring the distinction between a 32-megabit cartridge and 32-bit consoles), Donkey Kong Country did look different enough to have reaped critical and commercial success (and even mainstream press attention) far beyond what just another platform game should have rightly expected.

Another World

Almost diametrically opposed to Donkey Kong Country is Delphine’s Another World. Both are games that strove for graphics and animation beyond what could be achieved with conventional means. Where DKC used render farms, Another World required a new realtime, polygonal graphical technique to be developed from the ground up. The eerily beautiful results were unlike anything that players had seen. The game’s creator, Eric Chahi, has explained the development process in some detail on the official site.

Top Gear Rally

The Game Boy Advance presented an irresistible challenge to a certain type of programmer. It was widely known to be just barely capable of rendering polygonal 3D graphics, so among the tide of cartoon-licensed platform games and shoddy Amiga ports we would occasionally see games that had obviously started their lives at tech demos, experiments to see just how far that weedy ARM processor could be pushed.

Top Gear Rally was one of the best of these. Other racing games usually made at least one big compromise from the outset - sprite-based cars, a flat Mode-7 track, or an excessively foreshortened horizon - but Top Gear Rally managed to deliver the whole package, and with a passable frame rate to boot.

One conclusion we can draw from all this is that developers have concentrated most of their effort and ingenuity on graphical techniques. This is not unexpected, as graphics have always played a dominant role in securing a game’s fortune. Even so, the discussion unearthed plenty of examples of non-graphical tricks, such as the AI in Halo, the emotional bond formed by naming the soldiers in Cannon Fodder, or the interpersonal dramas woven by even the crudest football management games (as well as Midwinter and, of course, Animal Crossing).

If you know of other good examples of gaming smoke and mirrors, why not leave a comment below?

• The Universal Zulu Nation
• The Nation of Islam
• The Sioux Nation
• Belgium

Things which cannot:

• People who like certain American sports which EA holds exclusive rights to, severely limiting their ability to choose games based on quality, or in extreme cases, basic fitness for purpose.

Referring to such as the “EA Sports Nation” might come across as rather presumptuous, don’t you think?

(More substantial new content is on its way. Check back soon…)

Microsoft reeled off an impressive array of third party content, all of which will also be available on the PC and/or the PS3, with no new announcements. Their first-party efforts were largely focused on playing catch-up with the Wii (this month’s NPD figures are expected to show the Wii overtaking the 360 in the US, and without a significant price cut announced that gap is only going to widen), with increasingly-tired Scene It and Viva Pinata retreads being joined by a Singstar clone (Lips) and a technically simplistic Eyetoy-style game (You’re In The Movies). A protracted and awkward on-stage demo of the latter revealed it to be a video version of Mad Libs, which output very rough looking chromakey’d skits that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Kenny Everett Television Show.

Their big reveal was that Final Fantasy XIII will be coming to the Xbox 360, which is perhaps inevitable considering the series’ popularity in the US. Tellingly the 360 version is not slated for a Japanese release. Square Enix also showed a raft of other RPGs (one of which was openly stated as being PC-bound), demonstrating that Microsoft’s strategy for the Xbox 360 in Japan is to continue plodding down the Mistwalker route, providing isolated games that appeal to genre fans without building a software ecosystem around them that would justify a more general audience buying the machine.

Fallout 3 looked visually weak from the little that was shown, seeming little advanced from 2005’s Oblivion (and much greyer). The introduction of a turn-based combat option seems needless, and it remains to be seen if Bethesda can put together a more story-heavy RPG as opposed to another dungeon bash in the Diablo/Dark Alliance mould.

Resident Evil 5 (which also showed up in Sony’s show) impressed as expected. The number of elements being brought over from Resident Evil 4 (such as reskin/clones of Doc Salvador and Ramon Salazar) is getting a bit ridiculous, but that gets no complaint from me. A cooperative mode was announced, which will hopefully include something similar to the cabin siege in RE4. High def footage is here and is astounding.

Fable 2 annoys me, irrationally. I’ve not followed the game closely, but what was shown strongly suggested to me that Lionhead are suffering the problem that has been dogging them since Black & White, and that could be leveled at several other veteran developers: they’re trying to second guess an audience that they’re not part of any more. I suspect that there is a cultural disconnect with their American overseers at Microsoft Game Studios, similar to the issues that Just Add Monsters faced when making Kung Fu Chaos.

Fable 2 doesn’t seem to be a game with its own voice, rather an unappealing mixture of fashionable elements that they think Microsoft will like (a dog, like Nintendogs, a child that grows to be a hero, like Ocarina of Time, reams of customisation and minigames cribbed from Animal Crossing and The Sims) and forced attempts at quirky ‘British’ humour (bird shit, amateurish voice overs, burping wife). The demonstration assumed that we’d automatically want to spend a long time in this sandpit, fiddling with secondary and tertiary embellishments for hours on end. I can’t help but think that if I did want to do that, I’d choose another game which didn’t have such a profoundly unappealing art style, and perhaps implemented one kind of gameplay fully instead of half-baked versions of a dozen different genres.

Gears of War 2 cleaved to the formula of the flawed but commercially fortunate (”Kids! Need something to shoot at while you wait for Halo 3?”) original. A solid but technically unambitious game aimed at people that unironically whoop in crowds. The various multiplayer modes that have been discussed (including a 5P vs. AI siege mode, and a mode where the if the team leader is killed, the team loses the ability to respawn) sound intriguing, and will hopefully be implemented in other online games in future. I’m vastly more interested in what Id are doing with Rage, but then I’m an Id fanboy.

An overhaul of the 360 system software was revealed. I had previously predicted that towards the end of the machine’s life, it would receive a software update replacing the interface with one geared towards acting as a media hub and downloading content (as opposed to the current focus on discs). The announced changes go beyond my prediction, introducing a party system and the ability to install disc-based games to the HDD. It also introduces an ugly and derivative avatar system (which according to David Gosen is an improvement on Nintendo’s Miis because the characters have limbs - ?!) which will inevitably be used as a vehicle for more microtransactions. Coupled with the shift to larged HDDs, the new dashboard gives MS a solid foundation to encourage more users to regularly download games and video.

Most of the rest of the presentation was paying lip service to consumers outside of the 360’s target demographic. With the possible exception of Banjo Kazooie, the games shown in this family segment were a pretty miserable bunch (the aforementioned Singstar, Buzz and Eyetoy clones).

With no price cut and no new ideas, Microsoft seem to be treading water. Nothing suggested that wheeling out the likes of Scene It and Viva Pinata yet again would be any more successful than earlier attempts.

While Microsoft railed King Louie-like at the constraints of their demographic, Nintendo had a different problem. With the Wii and DS now way out in front, Nintendo seem to have slackened the pace of software development. There was little new to see, and much of it was aimed at the extended audience. Oddly, Nintendo chose to show very few third party titles, focusing on those that supported Wii peripherals such as the balance board and zapper.

Animal Crossing City Folk for the Wii seemed to be virtually identical to the DS and GC versions, with networking capabilities still seemingly being approached with a great deal of trepidation by Nintendo. In spite of this the underlying game is strong enough to warrant repurchasing, and the introduction of voice communications should improve the multiplayer mode over the DS’s fiddly text input. Perhaps it will be possible to transfer DS content to the Wii version?

Wii Sports Resort was used as the showcase for the new Wii Motion Plus gyroscope peripheral. Sword fighting and jet ski racing (basically Wave Race) demonstrated the capabilities of the device and looked like they might have some replay value. Hopefully there will be some additional events of similar complexity on offer, rather than throwaway ones like the Dog Frisbee game that was also shown. The game will probably be a default purchase for most Wii owners regardless, and hopefully will give the Motion Plus add-on enough momentum to gain third party support.

The only third party Wii title of any note shown was Call of Duty World at War, which appeared to at least be making an effort visually (unlike the PS2 and PSP ports the Wii is still occasionally lumbered with), with some slick flame effects. Hopefully this and the exclusive Shaun White snowboarding game mark the start of a trend for third parties making a decent fist of Wii development.

The big news for the DS was the announcement of an all-new GTA game for the system. Worryingly, most of the third party games for the DS were described as being ‘custom’ games, suggesting that most of the Western third parties still aren’t viewing the DS as an important platform, but rather as somewhere to offload lazy cutdown cash-ins on existing brands, a soulless Spore variant (which might as well be called Spore Universe Brand Extension Content for 8-13 Demographic) being a case in point.

The big finale (assuming that was what it was supposed to be) was Wii Music. This looked (and sounded) very dubious, offering dozens of instruments that could very simplistically be ‘played’ and seemingly dispensing with the skill element common to most successful rhythm games all together. It seemed that we were supposed to be convinced by Miyamoto’s endorsement of the game alone. Maybe there’s an audience for music games that aren’t being catered for by Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but it’s certainly not a strong enough proposition to justify the way it was presented here.

While the Nintendo presentation failed to deliver anything particularly exciting, it was interesting to see the disproportionately negative response that it provoked from gamers. The exclusive focus on the extended audience was interpreted as a slight by some particularly stroppy individuals.

The strange thing is that the most strident of these critics admit that they are better served by the other consoles and the PC, and in many cases don’t even own a Wii. Why they need another console to offer the exact same sort of thing isn’t clear. In the 16-bit era, when it became obvious that the SNES was the primary destination for JRPGS, JRPG fans bought SNESes. They didn’t petition Sega, they just got on with gawping at FFVI and Chrono Trigger.

What is really motivating this behaviour is fear. These identity conscious ‘hardcore’ gamers have seen how well the Wii is selling and are terrified of it becoming a de facto standard in the PS2 mould. I don’t think that this is really an issue that is going to come to a head any time soon. Between the PC, PS3 and 360 there is a large enough audience for games beyond the technical scope of the Wii.

Thankfully Nintendo didn’t resort to pandering to the most tiresome and nostalgia-blinded contingent of their fanbase by digging up the mouldering corpses of Punch-Out or Kid Icarus, as had been widely rumoured before the show. I’m sure that Retro Studios and Nintendo’s internal teams are working on some more appealing ‘traditional’ games, but with no new announcements at the show, the Wii’s schedule looks a bit barren for the rest of 2008.

After the two preceding damp squibs, all eyes were on Sony to offer something (anything) surprising. While Sony may have finally gotten the PS3 back on track, with HD-DVD buried and PS3 versions of multiformat releases steadily taking a larger slice of the pie, all the games they had to show today were either affected by preview fatigue (having been dangled in front of audiences for a year or more already), or too early in development to show actual footage. The theme of the presentation in fact seemed to be ‘wait and see’, pointing out that the landmark games in the psOne and PS2’s lifecycles mainly showed up in the third year or beyond.

Resistance 2 was demonstrated at length. A gameplay sequence mixed technically ambitious effects (a building-sized slavering monster, and more subtle elements like the lighting and post-processing effects) with rather clunky indoor sections and scripted events. A cinematic trailer put the game in a better light, showing more of the outstanding mechanical design teased in earlier screenshots, and ending with a spectacular shot of Chimera ships looming over a city.

Instantaneously, naysayers claimed that the game was not as pretty as Gears of War 2, blithely ignoring the extreme difference in scope of what Resistance 2 is technically trying to do. Gears of War 2 is still a corridor-based single player game with small-scale deathmatch-oriented multiplayer. It practically has to have baroque normal-mapped details plastered all over every surface to give the GPU something to do.

LittleBigPlanet was inventively used to present the obligatory package of conference chartzengrafs. A nice demonstration of the game/tool’s versatility, and perhaps an acknowledgement that there’s not really much more that can be said about the game itself that hasn’t been covered in previous demonstrations.

The PS2 was given a bit of stage time. Surprisingly, there is still some relatively big-budget development going on, with Mercenaries 2, Yakuza 2 and some new EA Sports games being shown. (The presence of EA Sports games on PS2 was surprising, and makes a still greater mockery of Peter Moore’s public griping about the performance of their games on the PC and Wii. The PS2 merits full-scale, deep sports simulations but the Wii doesn’t?)

An extremely diverse range of PSN games were then quickly run through (nothing that would get me reaching for my credit card, but all nicely polished). Playstation Home was wheeled out again. I was initially cautiously optimistic about Home, but with each delay it seems less of a great leap forward and more like a high concept project that has spiralled perillously off schedule and over budget.

A great deal of stage time was then spent on listing off a raft of complex and expensive PSP games which nobody will buy. It must be getting to the point where it would make more sense for Sony to bite the bullet and reposition the machine as a networked media player. (The PSP version of Valkyria Chronicles was news to me, and hopefully bodes well for a Wii port in future.)

Finally we returned to the PS3 for a set of teasers of games slated for 2009 and beyond. DC Universe was, of all the games shown this week, the one most inevitably destined to sink without trace. An MMO based around the DC Comics characters (and strangely seeming to allow the players to play as them - not sure how this is going to work), DCU was talked up by a DC Comics employee who seemed to think that the audience would be enthused by the stream of cryptic comic-nerd gibberish that he was spouting, rather than sitting in awkward, pitying silence.

Sony were on safer ground with a teaser of God of War 3. Sadly no gameplay footage was shown. Neither was their any footage of the final game to be announced, MAG (Massive Action Game), pitched as a large-scale (256 player) persistent squad-based war game from Zipper Interactive (the SOCOM developers). The modern combat setting will probably help to bolster player numbers, but it remains to be seen if this is going to be a spiritual successor to Planetside, or just a bigger, even more chaotic version of Battlefield. A PC version would be nice.

Oh, they also showed a new trailer for inFAMOUS, which I had literally not thought about since it’s last conference showing. A trailer was shown which appeared to be gameplay footage, and distanced the game from Crackdown both in terms of content and visual fidelity. Presumably we now won’t see any more about the game until it’s in the shops.

So in summary, RAGE, Resident Evil 5, Animal Crossing City Folk and Little Big Planet all look exciting. But we knew this already. Same time next year then.

“I think that there’s a difference in the type of customer that is buying the Wii. When you think about it, there’s a difference between trying to be the number one console with nine year old gamers, and being the console that offers the most experiences from 13 to 33…

You see they’re not buying games on it, right? They’re buying it, it’s like something they break out when people come over, and it’s maybe a fun thing, but it’s almost like the same people that buy a karaoke machine, you know? They’re not really buying it for games, they’re just buying it as a novelty.”

In other words: “Nintendo is for kids! Local multiplayer games are not real games! Fun is sooo immature!” Embarrassing, playground-level arguments, and particularly poorly timed considering that Super Smash Brothers Brawl currently sits at the top of the all-formats European chart, hot on the heels of the mega-success of Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii.

It will be interesting to see whether Nintendo make public any of the data from their Nintendo Channel survey system, because I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people buying Brawl aren’t “nine-year-olds”, they’re the same audience that bought into the previous installments of the series, and who overlap heavily with the crowd who bought GoldenEye 007, Halo and Grand Theft Auto IV. The audience we’re led to believe is in thrall of the Xbox 360.

To be fair to Greenberg, while at this point it’s clear that the Wii isn’t a fad or a novelty, it still remains to be seen whether the Wii userbase will maintain or increase the rate at which they buy games for the system. Having said that, it’s far from established that the Xbox 360 is driving huge software sales either. Take the PS3 and PC sales of recent blockbuster titles out of the equation, and zoom out from North America, and the story looks very different.

It appears that this isn’t the first time that Greenberg has gotten a little emotive and vented his frustration. (I’d quote from that but virtually every sentence is FUD. Rounding on the PS3 because not every game is 1080p? Please.)

Peter Moore had the right idea (your correspondent double-takes and peers at his drink suspiciously): if an interviewer asks you a tough question about a competitor, offer them guarded praise (”God bless ‘em”) and try to steer the conversation to safer ground. Don’t blurt out a load of FUD that flies in the face of the sales figures. The days of consumers buying into one games platform and shunning all others are over. You can focus on bringing something positive to that mix or you can alienate your customers. Your choice.

Man, I totally did not get on with these stupid things at all.

Pixelblocks are like a bunch of tiny one-stud legos that you can link together to make mosaics and shit. They say on the box that they’re a construction toy - yeah, like the Nintendo Wii is a games console (AMIRITE?). You can’t make the kind of cool spaceships and robots and stuff you can with legos, instead the point is that they let you recreate characters out of games. They don’t say this on the box anywhere because I guess that wouldn’t look very educational, and these things cost serious buck$$$ so they probably want to sell them to parents as well as developers and dorks.

I ordered the largest set they make (please note I did not go into a toy shop to buy these, toy shops are totally for babies), which includes 2000 pieces. Initially my plan was to build a Locust Abdominator, a new boss enemy from Gears of War 2 which rips out people’s ribcages with a giant vending machine claw. However with a bit of preliminary mental math I figured out that I had barely enough pieces to render one of the creature’s groinspikes. Jeez!

I was going to send a wicked harsh email to Pixelblocks LLC, but then some of the guys here explained that the idea was to make sprites from old retro games, from the caveman days before normal mapping and petulant occlusion stencils. I dimly remembered that Epic had done some 2D games before Unreal, Jazz Jackrabbit and Jill of the Jungle or something, but when I brought this up with the guys they pretended not to hear me. So all I could think of to do was Mario or Zelda or some other kiddy Nintendo shit.

All the technical brainsteins in the audience will have probably figured out that 2000 pieces does not exactly equate to true HD resolutions. It is in fact 0.002 megapixels, which is even worse than an iPhone camera I think. The colour depth is kind of limited as well - it could be charitably described as 12-bit colour I guess because you get bits in twelve different colours.

But what really blows is the fill rate. We are talking minutes per line here people. An Etch-a-Sketch could run rings around these things. I don’t see how anyone could do anything useful with this system ever.

I can’t help but think that I could have better spent the two hours that it took me to build Mario flipping the bird. I could have been designing an even gnarlier set of out-sized armoured shoulder pads for one of our ethnic stereotype space marines.

I wouldn’t recommend these at all as they’re totally not moving with the times. Next time I want something to decorate my cubicle I will follow the art department’s advice and buy a bunch of figurines from Spawn.com. I hear that they are coming out with a series of ‘dark’ reimaginings of Hanna Barbera characters this year. Their diorama of zombie Snagglepuss disemboweling Huckleberry Hound in fetish gear would look totally sweet on the shelf above my desk. Totally. Sweet.

Peace out dudes!
- DeThSkEwEr -

Erm, yes. Pixelblocks are quite a fun and versatile toy, but there’s a grain of truth in Brad’s criticism of how long it takes to build things with them. They are also rather expensive, although random tat emporia like TK Maxx sometimes have them on special offer. On the positive side, the end results look very impressive even without special lighting or presentation, and unlike mosaic beads they’re endlessly reconfigurable if you get bored of your current creations.

Flickr documents some of the slightly more imaginative uses they’ve been put to, such as both Sam and Max, various other characters, and this ridiculous effort (along with endless versions of Mario, Link and Megaman, of course).

I suppose they’re also quite a good tool for teaching the challenge of maximising what you can achieve with limited resources, although thankfully game developers typically don’t have a limited quota of black and white pixels at their disposal. Maybe that’s an opportunity for micropayments that EA should look into.

This piece was originally published here in April 2004. Puyo Puyo is my favourite of the many falling-block puzzle variants. Puyo Puyo 2 on the Mega Drive (now available on the Wii Virtual Console) is probably the version that best balances presentation and functionality, but Fever is a respectable entry to the series, and it was ported to a staggering number of platforms. (It’s really, really bloody twee though.)

Title: Puyo Pop Fever (Japanese title: Puyo Puyo Fever)
Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: Sega
Date Published: February 4, 2004 (Japan), February 27, 2004 (Europe), June 2004 (North America)
Platform(s): Sega Dreamcast, Sony Playstation 2, Nintendo Gamecube, Microsoft Xbox, Arcade, Apple Macintosh, Windows PC, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP
ESRB/PEGI Rating: E/3+
No. Players: 1-2

Puyo Pop Fever is Sega’s first attempt at bringing the popular Puyo Puyo puzzle franchise to the current generation of home consoles (if we don’t include the Dreamcast in the ‘current generation’). Since Sonic Team inherited the franchise from its creators (Compile) a few years back, each incarnation of the game that they have developed has displayed progressively more of their individual style. Puyo Pop Fever attempts to reinvigorate the franchise by introducing an entirely new art style and characters, as well as some (relatively minor) gameplay innovations.

Puyo Pop Fever’s protagonist is a ditzy apprentice magician called Amitie. Amitie attends a magician’s school (note the Harry Potter influence) and wants to become ‘a wonderfully clever magic user’ (note the amusingly stilted translation from Japanese). To this end she challenges everyone she meets (schoolmates, teachers and various unsavoury characters) to play Puyo Pop. Amitie’s chief rival is the snobbish Raffine (a playable character on the harder single player courses), and her teacher is the dreamy (as in, seemingly on Valium) Ms. Accord, who is compelled to deliver around half of her lines through a cat hand puppet for reasons unknown.

For the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with Puyo Puyo, the gameplay involves dropping pairs of small jelly blobs with eyes (Puyo) into a pit, with the intent of joining together chains of four or more blobs of the same colour, which then disappear. As with Columns, gravity makes the remaining Puyo fall to take the place of their vanquished brethren. This can lead to chain reactions of disappearing Puyo. The game is fundamentally competitive, with the player always playing against an (either human or CPU) opponent. When one player successfully makes a chain, Ojama (colourless nuisance Puyo) are dropped into the opponent’s pit. Increasingly elaborate chain reactions act as ’spells’ that cause increasingly large numbers of Ojama to fall. However the other player can create chains to counter these attacks. The first player to fill their pit loses.

Puyo Pop Fever introduces some variations to the classic Puyo Puyo game rules. Groups of three or four Puyo occasionally drop (the ‘four’ piece taking the form of a large 2×2 square puyo of one colour, whose colour can be changed with the ‘rotate’ button). The biggest change is the inclusion of Fever Mode. This is a special mode which is activated when a player fills their Fever meter by making consecutive chains. In Fever Mode the player is taken to a seperate game pit which is primed with Puyo arranged to set off a lengthy chain reaction. The player has a few seconds to place a Puyo to trigger the reaction. If they succeed this causes a massive attack to the enemy player, otherwise the Fever Mode pit is cleared and the player is presented with another arrangement of Puyo. This process is repeated until the player runs out of Fever time. Success of failure in this mode can turn the tables on the other player, and lead to a long, fraught battle of wits and reflexes.

By now it should be apparent that this is essentially the same game that we’ve known and loved in all its previous outings. In terms of presentation however it is a radical departure. Puyo Pop Fever is excessively cute. Admittedly, Puyo Puyo, with its bizarre, superdeformed RPG characters was fairly cute, but Fever turns it up to eleven. The characters are drawn in a brightly-coloured comic book style that brings to mind the Powerpuff Girls and Junko Mizuno illustrations.

The largely static cutscenes are accompanied by saccharine American voice acting. Amitie spouts insufferable valley girl slang (”Get really real!”), and the other characters are all given distinctive personalities by what seems to be a small but highly versatile voice team. Some of these are quite amusing. The skeleton character (a long-time Puyo stalwart) has been reinvented as an outrageously fruity fashionista (”Call the fashion police!”). An onion-headed character can only say the word “Onion!” with various inflections (similarly, a frog can only say “Ribbit!”). At one point the original Puyo heroine (Arle) makes an appearance, with a voice that seems to be a parody of her Engrish exclamations in the original games (”Fiyyya! Ice-u Storm! Gu-gu-guh!”).

Puyo Pop Fever’s twee music, large-print cutscenes and general atmosphere of kiddiness will probably be too irritating and embarrassing for some Tom Clancy-weened male gamers. I found them pretty much tolerable and in keeping with the theme of the game, and I don’t consider myself to be all that much of a fey hipster poseur. (Or one at all, in fact.)

There are some minor niggles with the game that might further dissuade some players who already own at least one Puyo-variant. There is no way to turn off the new rules in single player mode (while Fever Mode is a welcome addition, three- and four-Puyo groups and being allocated different pieces than the enemy player introduce too much randomness), although the multiplayer mode is fully configurable. The controls can be slightly cumbersome on an analogue pad, but not disasterously so. The maximum number of players is two, although three of the host platforms are accustomed to multiplayer games supporting up to four players (and Puyo Puyo 4 also allowed this).

Although the game has been developed as virtually identical versions for four seperate platforms (thanks to the magic of Renderware), not all of these versions are available worldwide. The Dreamcast version is understandably not available outside of Japan (as the Dreamcast is no longer officially supported by Sega in the West). More annoyingly, it turns out that the Playstation 2 version will not be released in the US, as a result of SCEA’s ludicrous and unconscionable policy to block games with 2D graphics from release in their territory (which has also, so far, robbed American players of the Playstation 2 version of Viewtiful Joe as well as various Metal Slug games).

Assuming you can get hold of it, Puyo Pop Fever is well worth picking up at its mid-range price point, whether you’re an existing Puyo fan or just not one yet.

On mobile games industry news sites (like Pocket Gamer and Mobile Entertainment), I’ve seen a steady trickle of positive news stories about a company called Greystripe. Greystripe’s business model is to license mobile games from publishers and ‘wrap’ them with dynamically updated advertising. Users can then download the games for free from Greystripe’s GameJump website (and elsewhere), and are shown some full-screen ads each time they enter or exit the game.

On the face of it, this sounds like a system that’s beneficial for all parties: customers get free games, publishers get a steady revenue stream, and advertisers get good data on how many people are seeing their ads. Certainly, the magic words “mobile advertising” (currently as effective for hooking venture capitalists as “mobile search”, “mobile video” and “free birdseed” have been in the recent past) have ensured that GreyStripe’s coffers have been generously filled by investors.

However, there are significant issues with such a model of which mobile games publishers should be wary. (Please note that I’m referring to ad-funded games in general here rather than singling out Greystripe specifically. There are other companies trying similar models which may also be affected these problems.)

The most obvious concern from a marketing perspective is that offering a game for free risks making consumers view that product and the entire class of products it belongs to as having no intrinsic value. If I can download your flagship game for free, why would I ever pay for another game from your catalogue?

The second, and potentially much more serious issue, is that a free service is likely to make no provision for customer support. Mobile games, by the nature of the technology they’re working with, present more potential pitfalls for the customer than simply buying a game from a shop for a PC or console. The vendor has to deal with explaining to the customer how the process of downloading and installing a game works (as the vast majority of customers won’t ever have attempted to download a game before) as well as ensuring that the process is completed successfully.

Even for paid services the level of customer support provided can be spotty, but for free games, the customer is effectively left to try to figure out how to obtain the game by themselves. Using the Greystripe example, the process of obtaining the game is made more complicated by the fact that the user must register on their website (providing a valid email address - likely to put off a lot of visitors before they begin), and then retrieve the game manually by visiting a WAP site and entering a numeric code. By way of comparison, most paid services simply involve texting a keyword to a five-digit short number and getting sent a download link via SMS in return.

At each step more customers will give up on the process through confusion, frustration or apathy. This sloughing off of a high percentage of dissatisfied customers who never even get their game is known in marketing circles as “churn” and it’s the polar opposite of what publishers should be aiming to achieve - instead of working to gain customer satisfaction that engenders repeat purchases and good word of mouth, they’re gambling on trying to reach a few people at the expense of pissing off loads more.

Of course none of this is helped by the fact that people seeing the words “free” and “ad-supported” will expect to be bombarded with email and SMS spam, irrespective of whether this is actually the case.

It’s telling that none of the big three mobile games publishers (EA, Gameloft and Glu) have licensed their games for inclusion on Greystripe’s service, and it’s a safe bet that they never will. Surprisingly they’ve managed to tempt some other (smaller but still quite high profile) publishers on board who offer a few decent titles, but the vast majority of the games on offer are ancient low-quality cack, the mobile equivalents of the shovelware that clutters supermarket ‘bargain’ racks (home to gems like Lady Cruncher and Ninjabread Man).

It’s also interesting (but entirely unscientific) to note that when I downloaded a game from Greystripe’s service to research this article, it contained generic house ads, which led to a list of links to gambling and porn sites. I do have to wonder whether their bullish claims for the service are reflected by real world performance.

In spite of all this negativity, I do think that there could be some circumstances where the ad-funded model would be appropriate and would make commercial sense (for instance for distributing game demos and promotional items), but I suspect that gamers will continue to be better served by paying to support games that offer a level of quality and diversity that couldn’t be sustainably delivered through ad-funding or other unproven models. Paying four or five quid to effortlessly, reliably get a quality game is a better deal than jumping through hoops to get games like this.

Continuing the trawl through my old games writing, here’s a look at Treasure’s 2005 remake of their breakthrough hit Gunstar Heroes. My opinion of the game hasn’t really changed, it’s a technically strong but otherwise unremarkable romp. At the time of course we didn’t realise that Gunstar and games like it would represent the peak of Game Boy Advance development (the official line from Nintendo was that the DS was going to be a “third pillar”, before its massive success effectively made the GBA obsolete).

I remember being terribly annoyed by John Walker’s 5/10 review of the game for Eurogamer at the time. It’s still an unfair review (the “less than one hour long” criticism is meaningless - the original game was of similar length, and many other console action games follow the arcade model of offering infinite replayability rather than hundreds of similar levels), but Treasure’s later efforts have been received more favourably.

The following piece was originally published here in December 2005.

Title: Gunstar Super Heroes (European title: Gunstar Future Heroes)
Developer: Treasure
Publisher: Sega
Date Published: October 6, 2005 (Japan)
Platform(s): Game Boy Advance
ESRB/PEGI Rating: E / 7+
Players: 1

Gunstar Super Heroes is a pseudo-sequel to Gunstar Heroes (Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, 1993). As the title suggests, the game is a retelling and technological upgrade of its predecessor (in a similar fashion to Super Metroid, Super Street Fighter II, etc.), sitting somewhere between a remake and a true sequel.

The game is a platform shooter (with a dash of mêlée combat) in the vein of a less clunky and more acrobatic Contra. Many elements of the game will be familiar to fans of the original, although there is no direct re-use of content. The game was originally intended to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the original (although obviously it arrived rather too late for that - regardless of what Sega of America’s poorly-researched press releases might tell you) and was highly anticipated by Treasure and Sega fans and critics alike, picking up several Best of Show awards at E3 2005.

Gunstar Super Heroes takes up the story several years after the events of the first game. Following the defeat of end boss Golden Silver by the original Gunstar duo, the Moon (the staging ground of the climactic battle) was destroyed and reformed as four smaller moons, each housing one of the Treasure Gems that powered Golden Silver.

Time passes, the people of Earth colonise the new moons and everything is generally peachy. Then one day, a fifth moon appears - a man-made satellite which serves as the headquarters of the Empire (the bad guys from the first game). The Empire, under the leadership of one General Grey, once again seek to reunite the Treasure Gems and re-awaken the Destructor. So it’s up to a team of secret operatives from the ‘3YE’ organization, styled after the original Gunstar Heroes, to put a stop to the Empire’s plans. This rather convoluted plot is basically an excuse to bring back virtually all of the major characters from the first game.

The game consists of seven main levels, each containing several distinct stages. These can be played through as either Gunstar Red or Gunstar Blue (although the differences between the two characters are minimal - effectively only the graphics of their primary weapon, and some of the cutscene dialogue) at three difficulty levels.

The first level (Earth) is a short tutorial-like level which introduces the player to the standard enemy types (different types of empire troops and small flying robots) that are seen throughout the game. The level culminates in a battle against a huge flying robot who is trying to kidnap Yellow, the Gunstars’ C.O. and pilot. This battle is the first graphical showcase of the game, featuring slick scaling and rotation effects on the boss itself as well as impressive explosion, smoke and flame effects.

Once this level is completed, the player may attempt the next four levels (or moons) in whichever order they chose. Each of these levels is loosely based on one of the first four levels from the original game, with the addition of several new stages, several of which are homages to other classic Sega games.

The first moon is the longest level in the game with five stages. The first of these is a 3D, into-the-screen (or rather, out-of-the-screen) flight on the back of the Gunstar’s jet aircraft, which seems to be intended as a tip of the hat to After Burner. Later in the level, there is an ingenious stage based on Flicky: our hero is trapped in a cave where they must rescue a number of chicks and lead them to the exit hatch, while avoiding being attacked by caterpillar-like creatures. This is made more difficult (and visually impressive) by the fact that the entire cave rotates as the player moves left and right (affecting gravity accordingly). (This is probably my favourite part of the game, and I wish they’d done more with it. - 2008 Ed.) The stage ends with a boss battle against another giant robot, this time one being piloted by Pink and her lackeys Kain and Kotaro, which is stupidly easy to beat - but in true supervillain fashion, this isn’t the last you’ve seen of them.

Moon number two is shorter and less extravagant than the first, consisting of only two stages. The first stage is a vertically-scrolling shoot-’em-up where the player must pilot a helicopter (which can be rotated clockwise and widdershins using the shoulder buttons) and destroy ground and air targets. (This level is based on Thunder Blade.) Trying to plough through this stage with guns blazing routinely ends in disaster, instead the player is forced to pick their way through the level, dodging back and forth to get a clear shot at the smaller and more awkward targets. In the second stage, our intrepid Gunstar boards an airship/flying fortress and squares off against Orange, a muscle-bound soldier, on the wings of a stealth bomber.

Onward to moon three, which is perhaps the level that most closely follows the structure of its inspiration, the celebrated mine-cart stage from Gunstar Heroes. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, this level consists of hurtling down a mineshaft at high speed on a small ‘hovering robot thing’, blasting troops on wheels and trains filled with more troops. The boss of the level is the Seven Force, a robot that can transform into seven forms. This battle is near-identical to the original with the exception of the graphical enhancements afforded by the use of true sprite scaling and rotation.

Moon number four sees the return of the Dice Palace stage from the original game. This level is essentially a Snakes and Ladders board game where the player must roll a dice to get around the board, with each square they land on representing a different mini-stage where they must complete a challenge or fight a miniboss. Unfortunately the structure of the level has been changed for the worse. The dice is represented by a moving cursor instead of being truly random. Likewise, the stage represented by each square is not random, and the high occurrence of backward steps result in the player having to visit nearly all of the squares each time the level is attempted. Some of the new challenges are excellent (such as a giant mangy teddy bear) but some are dull and annoying (for instance the boring platform assault courses that have replaced the item rooms).

On completion of the first four moons, the fifth, Death Star-like moon becomes available. This level begins with a reprise of the ‘long road’ section from Gunstar Heroes (although the various vehicles and robots that the troops attacked you with in the original are sadly absent). This is followed by a horizontally-scrolling spaceship shoot-’em-up section which introduces the novelty of allowing the level to be rotated using the shoulder buttons, but feels a little awkward as it doesn’t allow the player as much freedom of movement as might be expected. The level is finished off with another After Burner sequence, this time heading towards (and into) the Empire’s final base.

The final level (’G-Arc’) consists of a series of boss battles against all the characters encountered during the course of the game (Pink, Orange, Black and Green), this time equipped with new death-dealing vehicles and attacks. As with the original game, this stage is presented as being viewed on a monitor screen being watched by the other evil characters. On completion of this marathon stage, our heroes must then fight the God of Ruin himself, Golden Silver.

Gunstar Super Heroes is an interesting and not entirely unsuccessful attempt by Treasure to revisit one of their best-loved games and update it for a modern audience. While the original game was widely criticised for being too easy, Gunstar Super Heroes requires dexterity and planning on the part of the player to get very far (at least, on the Normal and Hard difficulty levels).

The most disappointing thing about the game (apart from the lack of a two-player mode) is that it now feels very compartmentalised. Instead of the flowing, uninterrupted experience of the original, the game is now broken up into very short stages with no thematic connection between them. Whereas the original game wrung every drop of gameplay from each of its scenarios, Gunstar Super Heroes prefers to burn through piles of unique graphics, enemies and levels without putting them to good use. There are several scenes in the game that feature huge, animated backdrops which are simply run past in a couple of seconds to get from one area to another, and serve no other purpose. Similarly, the dialogue sequences that bookend each stage (complete with screen-filling portraits, as seen in Astro Boy, and surprisingly well-executed voice acting), while not unwelcome, seem like a rather incongruous excess.

Lastly, if we take off the rose-tinted glasses for a second, we might also ask whether the technical improvements on display are really all that impressive, considering the twelve year gap between the two games. Gunstar Super Heroes is a very pretty game, but at no point does it ask anything of the Game Boy Advance that conventional wisdom says shouldn’t be possible.

Even with these criticisms, Gunstar Super Heroes is still a well-made game and probably the best example of its genre on the Game Boy Advance. The controls are responsive, the game feels fair (with the possible exception of the rather random attack patterns of the final boss) and besting particularly challenging stages is very satisfying. That said, it would have been nice if Treasure had concentrated their efforts on blowing our minds instead of lightly tickling our nostalgia glands.

First up, Tadhg Kelly